By Paul Reidinger

LIKE DANTE'S HELL , the restaurant realm has its descending circles of misfortune. At the bottom – the uttermost pit of woe – lies that bundle of addresses at which one endeavor after another fails with dizzying swiftness. Many of us are cartographers of this sort of thing, and when we pass by one of the accursed spots and notice that there is a new name, decor, and menu, we are likely to feel a little tremble – something like what Pickett must have felt, maybe, in leading his Confederates on their hopeless charge up Cemetery Ridge.

Still, as mutual-fund prospectuses are wont to remind us, past performance is no guarantee of future success – or, in the matter of restaurants, failure. Every now and then a redemption does occur, and while it is too early to drape that accolade across the shoulders of Sauce, which opened recently in a frantically flipped Civic Center space, there is some reason to hope.

Why the Sauce location should have turned over quite so many times (it has been, since 1996, Charpe's Grill, Bistro 131, Miu Miu, and at least two other enterprises whose names I can't recall) is not obvious. True, the restaurant is in a hotel, the Albion House Inn, but as Masa's and Postrio have proved, such a setting need not be fatal. Nearby are large institutions of government and the performing arts, which put people on the sidewalks night and day. A Gough Street address provides high visibility to speeding motorists. And the space has always been quite handsome inside, with a long glossy bar extending back from the host's station and, beyond an apertured interior wall, the comfortable, neither-too-big-nor-too-snug dining room.

The interior design has been subtly but attractively tweaked. The bar looks more or less as it did in past incarnations, but the dining room's banquettes are now upholstered in a paisley-ish pattern of taupe and claret, and the high windows on the south wall have been fitted with frosted glass. Carpeting, an unobtrusive touch, softens the noise; conversation is easy.

The chef, Ben Paula, counts among his recent gigs a stint at Charley's. I'd never heard of it and was forced to Google, which revealed that it's a restaurant in the Cannery. There are some places city people fear to tread, though to be fair to the Cannery, that name has been ditched in favor of Del Monte Square, and an organic farmers market has been instituted on Fridays and Saturdays to spruce up the gastronomic tone.

Paula's cooking has, consistent with all this, a lovely ingratiating quality. The food at Sauce reminds us of why we go on loving California potpourri cuisine while deploring the cliché it so often seems to become in clumsier hands. Sauce's menu is all about bounty – ahi tuna, kalamata olives, prosciutto, Dungeness crab – and the kitchen's angles of approach are mainly Mediterranean and Asian, with some classic Americana thrown in. The flavors are fresh and bright, and naturally the sauces are varied, conspicuous, and excellent.

If the first courses look a little pricey (the median must be around $10), that's because the servings are pretty big and quite shareable. Portobello mushroom fries ($9) – fat sticks of fungus reinforced with a coating of bread crumbs – arrive in an architectural, cross-hatched stack and are accompanied by a ranch dipping sauce that nicely accents their earthiness. Lemon-crusted calamari ($9) is really two dishes: a stack of tentacles crisp with a lemon-zesty batter, and a tumbling of hemispherical bodies stuffed with fennel sausage and bathed in a tomato sauce. And sesame shrimp ($12) take their kick from a syrupy sauce of chili, garlic, and some sweetening agent (or: a sauce) presented in a side dish.

For some reason I am reliably seduced by items like meatloaf and mac 'n' cheese (Sauce offers versions of both) even when there are perfectly plausible alternatives, such as halibut cheeks ($18) – meaty, almost like swordfish – braised in beurre blanc and served with a Chez Panisse-in-spring scattering of baby carrots and new peas. Paula's meatloaf ($16) is quietly spectacular: a thick disk of ground meat (the mix seems to include a fair amount of beef, judging from the reddishness) wrapped with strips of applewood-smoked bacon and served with truffled whipped potatoes and a ragout of green beans and mushroom bits. All the parts fit together beautifully, but the meatloaf disk could easily find a second life at summer barbecues as a kind of superburger.

The mac 'n' cheese ($16) also holds some surprises, beginning with the shreds of chicken laid atop the pasta for an extra measure of gravitas. Underneath, the macaroni isn't macaroni at all but hand-rolled papardelle (wide egg noodles) sensually dressed with Parmesan cream. (The word macaroni, incidentally, refers not merely to the familiar elbows of dried pasta but to the wider range of dried pastas made only with durum semolina and water.) It is a dish for grown-ups, who doubtless will welcome the stalks of blanched asparagus on the side.

Desserts are likable and user friendly. These include a Guinness-style vanilla shake ($6), served in a mug with a nice cap of foam but a bit short on flavor, and the forceful ice-cream "smash" ($6), pats of chocolate ice cream with smashed-up brownies mixed in. There's chocolate sauce too, the indispensable quality of many chocolate desserts and a last reminder that Sauce isn't called Sauce for nothing.

Sauce. 131 Gough (at Oak), S.F. (415) 252-1369. Dinner: nightly, 5 p.m.-midnight. Full bar. American Express, Carte Blanche, Diners Club, Discover, MasterCard, Visa. Moderately noisy. Wheelchair accessible.